I hear it all the time from my UK startup friends: They hate the local preponderance of tall poppy syndrome. In the US, it’s just the opposite: Not only do startup founders seem to get bonus points for audacity, but that generosity also extends to the failures. The logic seems to be that if they thought big once they can do it again, and maybe this time they’ll get it right.

Only this week, I learned that getting it right may have as much to do with cutting yourself down to size.

If big ideas are sexy because they make everything feel possible, products are ice water. They force you to choose what, exactly, you’re building.

For me, that realization arrived through the Flamingo Index. As a broad idea, it was clear-ish in my head: Flamingo Media serves the Story Economy, a fragmented and decentralized market made up of brands, creators, studios, platforms and investors, all participating in story-driven projects in ways that don’t fit the old entertainment industry.

The Index will make that market legible — essentially PitchBook meets IMDb, connecting projects to the companies, partners, financing, ownership models, distribution strategies and outcomes behind them.

It took a long time to get that far. (Apologies and gratitude for those who witnessed the journey.) I also believed that if I could just find the clearest possible articulation of the Index, the execution would become more straightforward, too.

That is what some folks like to call magical thinking. Here’s what really happened: I made the first version of the Index smaller. And that’s what let me start to wrap my head around building a demo.

My vision hasn’t changed. The Flamingo newsletter launches in January. Mapping the breadth of the Story Economy remains the goal. But now I can describe it with much greater clarity. 

The Flamingo Index is a sourced record of how brands participate in screen entertainment. Who made it, who financed it, who owns it, who distributed it — recorded project by project, fact by fact, each with the source it rests on. 

I’m going brands first because it’s not a silo. Their deals quickly point to the rest of the Story Economy — producers, studios, platforms, creators, distributors, and financiers. It’s also heavily funded and growing fast. 

I also kept noticing that when I got to the brand piece of the Index pitch, people’s eyes lit up. At the same time, there’s a lot of confusion about what brand participation in entertainment actually means. (I repeat: Brands will not save independent filmmaking.) Brands represent a fast-growing set of relationships, structures, and business models — and they’re poorly defined and even more poorly documented. That’s a good place to start.

Yay! Clarity at last. Only the moment you narrow the market is when you get to see dozens (hundreds?) of new, hard questions — all demanding an answer.

For example…

What does it mean for a brand to have “produced” something—did it originate it, finance it, commission it, acquire it, or put its name on it? When does sponsorship become financing? Who owns the underlying IP? If a project lives on YouTube, a streaming service, and a brand's own channels, what counts as distribution? What qualifies as an outcome when the only performance number comes from the company that paid for the project? And when a brand creates enough entertainment that it starts behaving like a studio, is “brand” even still the most useful way to classify it?

And once you have answers, you get more questions — and so on, until you have a taxonomy and later a schema. Those are intimidating words and should be, since getting them right (or wrong) will shape the success of the product.

Turns out I can totally live with that. Clearly there are still big problems, but big, clear problems can be solved. 

I can imagine the records. I can see the comparisons. I can identify the classification problems. I can talk to the people who might use it and ask whether the information is genuinely useful. I can build it in a way that earns trust.  

The other thing that changed is the Index moved closer to the center of Flamingo. I always saw it alongside reporting, events, and community, but now the sequence seems more obvious: Reporting can surface the companies, projects, and unanswered questions worth tracking. Conversations and events can add context. The Index can turn fragments into structure and reveal what’s worth reporting next.

I worried that narrowing the product meant narrowing the ambition. Instead, it gave the ambition somewhere to land. Making the Index smaller made its role in Flamingo bigger.

The Story Economy is still enormous. Flamingo will grow into a much broader intelligence system. But the first product doesn’t need to prove the whole thesis. It needs to be useful enough, specific enough, and trustworthy enough that people want to come back.

Big ideas are like puppies: cutest when they’re little enough to raise properly.